[Plugin: WordPress Importer] Importer not retaining Category architecture

After doing some research it looks like this issue is due to categories and tags containing the same slug… however, this could be a completely separate issue

I’m losing structure too and don’t have any tags at all ??
However, I do have multiple categories with the same ‘name’ but different slugs (e.g., I have “West Midlands” as both a ‘region’ and a ‘county’ in my hierarchy, with west-midlands and west-midlands-2 as the slugs.

I can see two places where the export/import is likely failing:
1) in the exported xml, <wp:category_parent> does not use the slug of the parent, but its name. e.g.
<wp:category_parent>West Midlands</wp:category_parent>

2) in the import, looks like there’s a check to see if a category exists before importing it… using its name:

// If the category exists we leave it alone
	if ( in_array($cat_name, $cat_names) )
	 continue;

However, I might be wrong on both counts ??

I’m having the same problem too.

It looks like the import process re-creates the category list rather than actually importing the data. If there are two categories with the same name they are interpreted as a single category and the posts are consolidated.

Perhaps there is a work-around or else each category needs a unique name.